Ever After

3

And when she died, when my mother died, I was rushed back to that moment over forty years ago.

The last time I visited her, which I instinctively knew would be the last time I would see her alive, was one exceptionally warm, radiant evening late last September. The curtains, a pale salmon colour, were drawn in her private room, which gave it a ruddy, subdued glow, but here and there a chink let in a shaft of more golden light, in which specks twirled and twinkled. In a hospital (I thought) there should be no specks. But always, in any beam of light, there are these tiny, sparkling shoals. And in a flash I was transported back to that April day in Paris, to the memory of those little flecks of fire in her fur collar, to the memory of my face crushed in that fur collar, its smell and her smell, and the shapely strength of her body beneath her coat, of which her body now was a sad, prostrated parody.

The windows were open behind the curtains and, as her wing of the hospital overlooked a park, there floated in the smell of cut grass, the occasional ricochet of playful voices and the gentle pok-pok of a tennis game in progress. It was as though she had expressly arranged the circumstances of her death so that they might seem the least fearsome, the least inimical to life.

She had already displayed, even as her days became numbered, her contempt for the fear of death and her disdain for those who fell prey to it — who lived their lives, as she put it, as if they deserved “a special pass.” It was an impressive and impressively timed demonstration. Never before had I heard her enlarge so much on her family, my forebears, about whom, so it would seem, a mixture of shame and scorn had hitherto kept her quiet. It was as if, now the end was near, she was driven reluctantly back to the other extremity of her life, to her origins and ancestry.

She had scoffed at Sam’s recent researches in this area, his absurd pedigree-hunting, but also humoured him, as she always humoured Sam, as you might indulge a child. But then Sam, for all his businessman’s bravado and native robustness, had a different attitude to death from my mother, as both she and I knew well from times gone by. If I had wanted to confirm it (and gain a little more cheap revenge), I need only have stepped out of that hospital room and along the corridor, as indeed I did later, to where Sam was waiting (I was first, he was next), an expression on his face, despite the mellow warmth of that evening, as if he were sitting in a room made of ice.

I’m glad death took him quickly and unannounced and, as it were, in flagrante.

For all her vocal powers, for all her capacity to chatter, squeal and, sometimes, shriek, my mother was never an eager raconteuse. I think she regarded reminiscence and tale-telling as a kind of weakness, an avoidance of the central issue of life, which was to wring the most out of the present. I never received from her, any more than I did from my father — perhaps this is why I became such a bookworm — my due dose of bedtime stories. Yet at the very end I was suddenly treated to a final and, so it seemed, irrepressible bedtime story — me, this time, at the bedside — of her remembered sires. And though the story had its moral, though she seemed to summon these ghosts only to arraign them for their folly (rather than to say she would soon be joining them), I wish she hadn’t left it so late. I never knew they were such a colourful bunch.

There was, first of all, my grandfather on my mother’s side, George Rawlinson, who died before I was born and of whom I knew only that he had been a medical man and, guessing from my mother’s silence, that some misfortune best not talked about had befallen him. He was in fact a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital, before whom had once lain a brilliant career in the then still-infant neurological branch of his profession. A pioneer brain surgeon, no less.

Who has heard of George Rawlinson? Who has heard of the Rawlinson Forceps, to which George, vainly wooing posterity, gave his name and on whose subcranial purpose I would rather not dwell (though my mother did not shrink from describing it). My grandfather’s path to eminence had seemed altogether assured until one day in 1923, when either his sound judgement or his sure fingers failed him just once. In came a sick but restorable young man; out came a permanent vegetable — who just happened to be the darling son of a Lord. Result, by stages: scandal, divorce, penury.

Then there was George’s older brother, my great-uncle, Rupert Rawlinson: Major, formerly Colonel Rawlinson; “Ratty” Rawlinson, as he was apparently known to his intimates—“Uncle Ratty” as he was known to my mother. It was in some lesser-known campaign of the Great War — Macedonia? Mesopotamia? — that his military career, likewise seemingly destined for stardom, took its calamitous turn. The wrong decision at the wrong time, an order given or not given that should not or should have been given. An inglorious, unglorifiable blunder. Result: court martial, demotion, ignominy.

My great-uncle did his best to outlive this disgrace, at least in the strictly numerical sense, since he died aged eighty-one and was still lingering on shortly before I was born. Yet according to my mother — and I am repeating now what she told me, brazenly enough, when her own death-warrant had effectively been signed — it was craven fear of oblivion, the desire to cheat death by the vain quest for distinction, that was the root of the matter, as much with Ratty as with George.

You would have thought that two brothers following the not unrelated trades of soldier and surgeon would not have been so affected. Both would have had fairly naked experience of mortality. But this, my mother claimed, was just the point. They chose professions that brought them close to death, in the empty hope that this would guard them against it. My great-uncle, who was no coward by a soldier’s standards and seems to have suffered, on that fateful day, an excess of valour over sense, hoped that his officer’s sword and his shining record in the Sudan and elsewhere would confer on him both renown and a kind of personal invulnerability. Likewise, George, as he audaciously probed what some have held to be the very seat of the Soul, might have felt himself privileged above ordinary beings, and might have foreseen his fame outlasting his forceps.

With Rupert, she insisted, the real trouble only began one snowy morning in the winter of 1920, when, a sound but dishonoured sixty-five, he took a nasty tumble down the front steps, cracking his head badly on the way, and for a day or so lay in a parlous condition.

“The man panicked, sweetie. He went to pieces. He thought his hour had come, with his shame still fresh upon him.”

How she could have been so sure of this, I don’t know. She was only nine at the time. But then I was only nine when my father—

In any case, it was this incident, in her view, that exposed the true tenor of the man and turned him for the rest of his life into an incurable and exasperating eccentric. The immediate “panic” had taken a specific form. In the midst of his fever and ill-founded terror, Rupert was apparently heard repeatedly to remonstrate that his younger brother was not to come near him, was not going to poke about in his skull with his fiendish instruments. George not only did come near him but, with little more than a cursory examination and no recourse to incision, pronounced that Rupert was making a big fuss about nothing and would recover in a day or so. The second humiliation of Uncle Ratty’s life.

My great-uncle was revenged, of course, when George took his own irremediable tumble only three years later. But, not satisfied with this, Rupert, as the senior member of the family and chief possessor of its fortunes, proceeded to play a vindictive, teasing game with my grandfather and his children (my mother and her brother, James), taunting them in their reduced circumstances with the meanness of his hand-outs and his own obstructive longevity.

But by this time, it seems, he was no longer entirely in possession of his faculties. That knock on the head, perhaps — just to spite his brother — had had its effect after all. He now devoted his time to perfecting in himself the caricature of a cranky, retired army officer, exaggerating or inventing past honours, while time softened his disgrace; and, when this didn’t work, looking for borrowed glory in the family archives. In his last years, this antiquarian urge (I admit it: the spirit of Uncle Ratty lives in me, as it lived even, for a while, in Sam) took an all-consuming form. Namely to prove that since his name, Rawlinson, denoted “son of Rawling,” in turn a palpable corruption of “son of Rawley” or “Ralegh,” his lineage might be traced, with much labour and subterfuge, to the great Elizabethan worthy himself, he of the pointed beard, muddied cloak and imperishable fame …

And then, going back a generation on my grandmother’s side, there was the Devon branch of the family — the right region for Sir Walter if the wrong name — who had made and lost their fortune in local copper and tin, neither of which seemed to have been as steady a bet as plastic.…

And then (did Uncle Ratty feel moved to pause here, I wonder? Did he peruse the Notebooks? But what did he want with another scandal and a lot of wordy mumbo-jumbo, and another non-Rawlinson?) there was Matthew Pearce — my mother’s great-grandfather — of Burlford.

All this she told me in the early stages of her illness — not, if I have given that impression, on that final, gilded evening. By then she could not have said anything more, because she had lost the mechanism of speech. Those last visits were to a silent, staring woman, her throat and neck packed around with all kinds of surgical junk, so that she could still breathe, and all verbal communication restricted to what she could write with a marker-pen on a special, wipe-clean clipboard. I think the sudden bout of disclosures, if it expressed in her peculiar way her own readiness to accept death, was also a recognition of the anticipated fact: that before loss of life would come loss of voice; that if she had things to say, she had better speak away. Though when silence struck, I could not help wondering — I still wonder — whether she had quite got round to saying all she intended.

I blamed her, silently, and she knew this, for the timing of her death, coming so soon, or at least announcing itself so soon, after Ruth’s. Perhaps Ruth’s death had immunized me, so that I could face the distress of my mother’s with a sort of foggy, battered steadiness. But then she was seventy-eight. And, of course, this worked the other way round. I was witnessing in my mother the sort of horrors that Ruth had — avoided. My mother’s unrebelling submission to them was a kind of declaration that she was made of tougher stuff than Ruth, as she was made of tougher stuff than my father. (Oh, she was tough, all right.) And I could not help thinking that her merciless appraisal of her family, her parables on mortal dread and the vanity of ambition, were her indirect way of delivering, at last, her jealous judgement on her daughter-in-law.

Why did she have to do it? To die then? To be so cruel? To block, to steal, Ruth’s afterlight? But then it struck me that perhaps all of this could be turned round yet another way again, and that, amazing as it was to conceive, there might have been in the cruelty a shred of unbelievable kindness: she was using her death to shake me out of my stupor of grief. (“Buck up, darling, it’s not the end of the world.”) There was a moment when my grasp of this possibility must have shown in my eyes; and her eyes had glittered back: you see, I am really a mother, after all, not such a selfish bitch — I give myself up for my son.…

It was an irony that went unmentioned that death came for her in the form of cancer of the throat, of the larynx. A punishment for having already, in one sense, forsaken her voice? You cannot help these thoughts. But I do not think she was cowed by superstition, any more than she was cowed by death.

Her voice! Her singing! Her ringing soprano. It is significant that in her lecture on the lure of fame she did not cite her own once budding musical career. But then she had abandoned it long ago: the point was made. And in any case, in her opinion, her singing voice was just a “gift,” she owed it no special duty; and the reason she always gave for her early dedication to it was simple economic necessity in the face of Uncle Ratty’s stinginess: “You have to use what you’ve got, darling — but only when you need to.” Was it her fault that some possessive music mistress had “discovered” her? Or that her ailing father, who had once thought of himself as a “gifted” surgeon, took some solace in his final days from his daughter’s accomplishment (the tableau is perfect: the humbled dissector of the brain; that ineffable virtuosity)?

The word “gift” troubles me. Is a gift something that belongs to us or not? If it is simply something we have rather than receive, why do we use the strange word “gift”? And if a gift is a true gift, then surely my mother was right — it comes unconditionally; you can take it or leave it, cherish or renounce it. But Ruth would not have held this view. Ruth would have said, I think, though she never said it in so many words, that we must serve our gifts.

I have always thought of myself as one of the great ungifted, so who am I to judge? My mother died, of throat cancer, because she neglected her gift. Ruth died of lung cancer, because she served her gift and was rewarded for it — and fate strikes quickest at the gifted and successful. There is no consistency or justice in superstition — but you have these thoughts. Easier to say that Ruth died of lung cancer because she smoked a lot. But then, we all know, some people smoke and live to be ninety. I like a cigarette myself. (Neither my wife’s death nor my own foiled one has cured me of the habit.) A gift is a gift: to treasure or disdain, to use or abuse, keep or reject. Including our bodies? Including our lives? Including our selves?

And, truly, my mother’s gift, as I remember it, was like something that didn’t belong to her. When she sang, it was as though some other creature was born inside her. A spasm of breast and throat, an upward parturition, a songbird hatching in her bosom — and out of this woman, so unscrupulous, so indolent, so heartless, my mother, would come a sound so sweet and miraculous, it was impossible not to yield.

“Who is Sil-via? What is she-e …?”

It must have softened even the rancorous heart of Uncle Ratty, disturbed in his dusty studies by those clear notes rinsing through the house. It must have bewitched the audience at concert halls and recital rooms in Reading and Maidenhead and Windsor. Among the debris that came into my possession after her death (along with Matthew Pearce’s testament) was a yellowed newspaper cutting recording my mother’s solo début (arias by Handel, Gluck and Purcell) at a concert in Reading in March 1929, in which the reviewer, Hugo Duval, saving his barbs for the orchestra, singles out “Miss Rawlinson” for her “exceptional promise” and “exquisite charm and purity.” Charm and purity! Charm, yes. How much was Hugo’s enthusiasm elicited by my mother’s vocal talents alone?

A career lay before her (she might have thrown away that cutting; she kept it). She might — who knows? — have trod the opera stage. And yet when she married my father, she abandoned the prospect and sang thenceforth — as if simply for the pleasure of it — only those intoxicating snatches I remember. And when my father died — it took time for me to realise, time for the truth of it to sink in — she gave up even that. Her throat never quivered, the songbird never took flight again.

And it is curious that in that catalogue of family failures, in that roll-call of doomed, obscurity-dreading, honour-hunting attention-seekers, she did not mention my father. She avoided my father altogether.

How were they ever joined together? Why, with her merciless view of masculine pretension — though perhaps it was unformed then, perhaps it only came with my father — did my mother marry my father? A man over twenty years her senior and, superficially at least, of precisely the same mould as Uncle Ratty: Colonel Unwin (a full and true colonel this time), formerly of the regular army, latterly of some ill-defined, semi-civilian sphere of duty between the military and the diplomatic services. Another careerist, another star-chaser.

One answer is simple and perhaps all-sufficient. He was a good catch. He rescued her; she bagged him. In 1935, when the marriage took place, he was forty-five years old, to her twenty-four. He came of what might have been called then “good Berkshire stock”; had “distinguished himself,” with no unfortunate Rattyesque blots, in the Dardanelles and Palestine; had served in India, where — this was about all I learnt from his own lips — he “shot tigers,” and where he was married, briefly, the first time around: one of those pathetic, semi-arranged marriages involving a shipped-out bride and ending in tropical fever. My mother told me her name was Vanessa. I see a creature compounded of white tulle and pale, sacrificial skin.…

When he returned to England in ’33, he was a seasoned officer in his middle years, conditioned by matrimonial disappointment to a life of service and duty, young enough still to nurse ambitions, possessed of a patrimony he had not yet had the chance to squander — and a perfect target for my mother’s charm. I don’t blame her for fortune-hunting. Now that her father, the hapless surgeon, was dead, how long was she to go on waiting for Uncle Rupert either to die too or to make some provision for her and her younger brother? Yet Ratty, with all his dread of the Great Leveller, lived on, steadily growing more crankish and steadily exhausting what was left of the Rawlinson riches.

It was just possible that the motive of which I know so much — revenge — entered my mother’s calculations. An army officer. With a clean and honourable record. And enjoying, at that time, just that rank of major to which Ratty had fallen. The mockery of it. The gall of it. Uncle Rupert could not prevent the marriage, but if he ever swore it should take place only over his dead body, he almost proved himself correct, for within a year of the wedding he at last gave up the ghost. Whether he had achieved by then, to his own satisfaction, the ultimate and redeeming goal of his life — certain proof of his kinship with Sir Walter Ralegh — no one can say.

My mother being excluded, or in any case now provided for by marriage, Uncle Ratty’s dwindled estate passed to her brother. Who did not have long to enjoy it. For, in reaction, perhaps, to the family tinge of khaki, he joined the Navy in 1939 and was killed in the earliest months of the war, not in action but in some miserable and obscure collision at sea — another instance, I suppose, of Rawlinson ignominy.

I was three years old at the time, so my Uncle Jim, perhaps in his naval togs, must once have dandled me in his arms, but I don’t remember him. Nor do I recall my mother’s being plunged into sisterly mourning. But a framed photograph of Jim was one of the few personal remnants of her past which she allowed herself to keep. It disappeared when she married Sam. I could see why Sam would never have liked it. It was only after her death — the photo is mine now — that I discovered that she hadn’t disposed of it but had simply hidden it from view.

He looks appallingly young and appallingly ignorant. Life has a thousand avenues, but he is fixed for ever — a perpetually grinning midshipman. He has my mother’s sparkle, none of her cunning. And, of course — this was Sam’s difficulty — I cannot look at that photo without seeing also the photo of Sam’s brother, which Sam first showed me, slipping it confidentially out of his wallet and giving me the facts, in those very early days in Paris. A shrewd but ill-fated piece of emotional trading. Sam’s brother (tropical whites; a lady-killer’s smile), Sam’s younger brother, Ed, who for these last forty years and more, just as Uncle Jim has been lying somewhere under the North Sea, has been lying under the South Pacific.

And what did my father — elevated now into some safer, more Olympian zone of warfare, touring the military purlieus of Berkshire, Hampshire and Surrey and sometimes being called to Whitehall, even to Washington — think of his new young bride? At his age, and after the first attempt, his notions of marriage must have been all to do (poor fool) with seniority, authority and self-esteem. He saw my mother as a pretty adornment to his own advancement. Or perhaps — after all those years of rigour under the Indian sun — he melted in the mild air of the Home Counties and in a wave of sweet self-delusion took this rather showy flower to be the perfect, adorable English rose.

And perhaps it was her voice, her gift, that swung it. That turned him from protector (perilous role) into worshipper (even more perilous one). His career; her career. He might have fostered, guided that career — he was prepared to be humble and generous. And the two things were not uncomplementary. A vision, a consummation: the steel-haired diplomat and his diva wife; he sits in his box, proudly and conspicuously clapping, while she, on the stage, receives an avalanche of bouquets.

(Didn’t his dream come true in my life?)

But scarcely was he married than she gave up her career. And he was left clutching the rags of his dream, her abandoned stage robes, not knowing — so he would discover — how to deal with her naked yet somehow less graspable self.

I think I knew her, in some ways, better than he did. I think I was closer to her than he ever was. I remember, for instance, one afternoon in the autumn of what must have been either ’43 or ’44. He is away on one of his mysterious trips, and she, in defiance of the black-out regulations and with my collusion, is tending a bonfire. There is the usual pile of dead leaves and garden debris, but on top of this she is strewing — and I am helping her — so-called “rubbish”: papers, files, letters.

I only guessed later what she was doing. She had decided that the time had come to dispose of all that “junk” of Uncle Ratty’s that had come to her via her brother and which her brother had never had time to sort out for himself. All that research. All that evidence. All that burrowing after noble origins. And in amongst the junk there might so easily have been the disregarded notebooks of Matthew Pearce of Burlford — who knows if some other, unknown manuscript was not casually cremated that afternoon? With my own ignorant hands I might have tossed Matthew on to the pyre.

I don’t remember her showing any special emotion, only her evident pleasure in what she called a “jolly good bonfire, sweetie.” She wore for this occasion — but this was typical of her — not some sloppy gardening outfit, but an ensemble much more chic than practical: sleek, well-cut trousers, which at that time must have been a matter of fashionable novelty; a figure-hugging, collared jersey, with a Paisley silk scarf; all of which would have looked well at the best golf club. While she wielded the rake and struggled with branches, this gave her the appearance of being skittishly feminine, sillily, fetchingly out of her element, so that any male passer-by (though we were alone and at the end of the garden) would have felt compelled to say, “Here, let me,” taking the rake from her; and my mother would have stepped back in blinking, coquettish satisfaction.…

The memory of the smooth pear-shape of her waist and bottom, which her trousers calculatedly set off; the memory of our faces glowing greasily and mischievously while the sparks danced and a blackbird tink-tinked indefatigably in the beech hedge; the memory of her, on a sudden whim and without explaining, going into the house and returning, through the thickening twilight, having raided my father’s special reserves, with two glasses, one, filled only partially, for me; of her raising her glass to catch the full rubescence before the fire, then bidding me, with a wink, sip with her. My first taste of wine. “Chambertin, darling — divine.” My mother: Sylvia Unwin, née Rawlinson. I don’t believe my father ever communed with her more intimately than this.

I see her, in the gathering dark, rake the embers of Uncle Rupert’s dreams. And I hear her, as she steps back, grasping the rake like a spear, and as the blackbird in the hedge at last admits defeat, begin to sing:

“Who is Sil-via …?”

• • •

She lay in that rufous, glowing light, and the wipe-clean clipboard lay untouched beside her. I realised she was too weak to use it. If she had wanted to use it, I would have needed to guide her hand. I will never know what she might have said. But surely while she still had her voice she would have said all she meant to say. Or written one last letter … I will never know how much she felt the agony of willing words but having no means to utter them. I will never know if, to her, the words and all the resources of her voice still seemed to be there, as they say amputees still sense their absent limbs. Fish are mute when they tumble into the net. Perhaps the near-to-death (but I should know this) have already retreated a long way into themselves. They cannot waste their energies on those strange irrelevancies the living, on all those wearying transactions that happen on the surface of things. They can do without words. Perhaps my mother’s silence was golden.

I held her hand, which could only muster a faint returning grip. If I had not known this was my mother, I would scarcely have recognised her. All the cheerful plumpness she had gained in middle age had gone. She was a bag of bones. Her eyes, little trapped pools in their sunken sockets, seemed the only living things about her. They looked at me, over the wall of her speechlessness, and I could not tell what their infinitesimal glints and dilations meant. Apology? That I should have to witness her in this state? Or just apology? Defiance? Yet it seemed to me that whatever those eyes expressed, they were looking, intensely, at me, they saw me clearly; they were looking into me, assessing, questioning.

There was this sound of tennis balls. She lay with her thin arms above the covers, and her head in the peculiar, chin-jutting pose necessitated by all the scaffolding beneath her jaw. I will never know if that air of queenly serenity was a trick of that enforced posture and the drugs circulating through her, but I like to think of it as her genuine state of being. The curtains stirred, allowing a fuller beam of sunlight momentarily to penetrate the room, and she smiled, faintly but distinctly, the way a child smiles at some simple distraction. So she was not that far within herself. But as I bent towards her — it seemed to me that in order to speak to her, I had to whisper almost directly into her ear, otherwise she would not have heard — her eyelids slowly closed. I knew this was not death — she lasted almost another twelve hours. I knew her eyes would open again, for Sam. But I knew she was saying, after her last smile to me, Go. Goodbye.

I kissed her brow. Whispered my own goodbye. I left the room like a tiptoeing parent at bedtime. I felt perfectly calm, as if I were doing something familiar and routine. Immunized? Perhaps. Along the corridor, I found Sam, all alone, in the waiting room. The look of terror on his face focused for a moment into a sort of searching expression that was an echo of hers, then dissolved into bewilderment. He might have been going to his own death. I squeezed his arm. But our little change of sentry duty was conducted, fittingly perhaps, without any exchange of words.

I went out immediately into the park. Into this Indian-summer balm, this land of the living. The air was almost completely still; only an occasional breeze stirred the trees, as it had stirred my mother’s curtains. The sun was low and rich and everything under its touch — the midges whirling under the trees, the veins of leaves, the mica in the path — appeared specially illuminated. People’s voices sounded slow and hushed.

It seemed important that I should track down the tennis game, and I followed the sound of the balls, which, strange to say, was harder to make out at ground level. There were only two courts beside each other, in their tall, wire cage, and only one of them was occupied. A young couple were playing. As I approached they stopped, and I thought for an anxious moment they had finished and were about to leave. But they were only changing ends. The girl’s legs were slender and tanned. As they passed at the net, they paused to fondle and kiss, and it seemed again to hang in doubt whether they would continue their game or not. But then they walked to their respective ends — the whole court was bathed in the rays of the sinking sun — and then the reassuring, inconsequential sound of the balls began once more.